The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

The Bahamas is “rapidly closing” the 11 percent winter booking gap, a senior tourism executive says, with the country’s main promotion board enjoying a 24 percent rise in website “conversions”.

Fred Lounsberry, president of the Nassau/Paradise Island Promotion Board, told Tribune Business that the past four weeks’ increase in website visitors who subsequently research stays at member hotels indicated that The Bahamas is quickly shrugging off any Hurricane Dorian-related fall-out.

“We are definitely see positive trends towards closing the 11 percent booking gap,” Mr Lounsberry said. “I was just looking at our website visitation, which is our best barometer, and if you look at our last four weeks things are moving in a very positive direction.

“We look at the previous week year-over-year, and the previous four weeks year-on-year, and what we have been seeing is that from the United States we are up 8 percent over the same week last year, and the previous four weeks were up 14 percent over last year, bearing in mind last year was a stellar year for tourism.”

Mr Lounsberry added: “From Canada we have seen a 64 percent increase over the last four weeks. We are seeing very good positive trends coming out of Canada due to our promotional trip that is currently ongoing. We were on quite a roll up to September, but we have seen the recovery from mid-October.

“Canada is way up. We were in Toronto yesterday along with Minister D’Aguilar and his Ministry of Tourism team, who are touring all of Canada spreading the message about The Bahamas. We had about 500 media houses come to our media lunch. We also had a gigantic turnout for a travel agent even. We had over 300 attendees and it was a great success. Again, the message continues that not all of The Bahamas was devastated. The response we got from our attendees was terrific.”

Mr D’Aguilar last week told Tribune Business that the booking pace for the key January-April 2020 winter season, which is the period when resorts and tourism operators make the bulk of their annual profits, was down 11 percent year-over-year.

He voiced optimism that this gap will be narrowed by then, and this was echoed by Mr Lounsberry based on the rate at which the promotion board’s website is converting visitors to ‘heads in beds’ at member hotels.

“What we are seeing there in the conversions for the past four weeks is that we are at a 24 percent increase in conversion, which means they come to our website and they go to a hotel website or contact a hotel and see what the deals are available to them. It is a good indicator that there is a lot of serious interest out there for The Bahamas,” he said.

Mr Lounsberry told Tribune Business that the promotion board had started a “heavy marketing push” in mid-October, and currently has television spots in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, Houston, Miami, New York and Philadelphia. It is also running digital promotions in Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Tampa.

“The digital spots are very, very targeted. It is not mass communication in the traditional sense, but it is very targeted to certain households and certain persons with particular income and travel tastes,” said Mr Lounsberry.

“We measure that statistic on a weekly basis. We measure this by going on to our website, and we have seen that a lot of our increase is due to the public relations we have been engaged in and all of the negative publicity is being corrected.

“The biggest thing we have to overcome is that media has been a lot more fragmented. So we also put our digital videos on YouTube, and we are also on all of those markets mentioned earlier including all of the major cities in Canada.”

Speaking to the increase in the promotion board’s marketing budget, Mr Lounsberry said: “We have spent up to $3.2m for the fourth quarter, which was increased by 15 percent year-over-year. We just have to get the word out and be aggressive.

“For example, this Canada mission was fantastic. I want to compliment the minister for putting this together. The Toronto response was really good. They are very appreciative of us coming and setting the record straight on what the truth is in the Bahamas.

“Everything I am hearing is we are closing that 11 percent gap rapidly. Overall, our airline partners are very understanding and they say that it has been slow but it is picking up. This will continue well into next year.”